Carrying on from our first post following the results of our developers’ adventures in the most recent ContrOCC hackday, here is the final set of projects: Graphically presenting performance information to the lay developer – Julian Fletcher Cleaning up the developer documentation – Maciej Luszczynski CSV Merger – Matthew Clarke F#/C# – Nathan-Madonna Byers ContrOCC version manager – Nigel Palmer An executable imports/exports specification – Patrick Donkor Improving code integrity checks – Steph Sharp Migration from within the ContrOCC UI[...]

Our ContrOCC hackdays give our developers a day to work on tweaks, gripes, improvements, or whole new features of their choosing and then sharing those with the rest of the team. This year we have so many team members I have split this post in two; we’ll post the remaining projects soon. Here is the first set: Converting the distributed tests config file to XML – Alan Carter Converting ContrOCC tools to use Git – Chris Griggs Visualising the ContrOCC Database – Chris[...]

This picture was generated based on the most common words in the user guide for the upcoming ContrOCC version 8 roadmap release. Client, Service, Care and Package are seen to be important as are Financial, Payment, and Charging. More prosaic common words are dictionary, date, default, report, see, and used. Our thanks to the entertaining wordle.net which made this fun and easy to do.

Imagine you’ve been asked to think up a really difficult technical challenge. Well how about delivering health and social care on line, using self-service portals, to frail and elderly citizens? For good measure, imagine that those people need your services to be as simple and familiar as Amazon or Google and that the people funding you are Local Authorities, facing budget cuts in the order of 60%. Oh and you have to ensure accessibility – from PCs, tablets, mobile phones,[...]

Jeff Gothelf is the author of Lean UX, a book that plugs into the theory of The Lean Startup and looks at how User Experience design processes fit in with the Lean approach. Jeff was interviewed by Communitech News and described what he believes is the key to building an innovative product or company: Talk to your customers. I mean, really have the humility to listen to your customers. Learn what it is that they love about your product; learn[...]

National Grid will be showcasing three of their OCC-partnered projects at the Low Carbon Networks & Innovation Conference (LCNI) in Aberdeen, 20-22 October 2014. The conference is a platform for gas and electricity network operators to showcase projects sponsored under their NIA and NIC innovation schemes. The OCC-partnered projects are: Ramp Rate Study System: an interface to a numerical modelling tool that allows engineers to study the effects of a sudden change in gas pressure (“ramping”) on the network. Standards[...]

We had a requirement at OCC to build a RESTful web service that would be able to run on both Windows and Linux servers. Someone suggested we give Mono a look to see if we would be able to use the ASP.NET Web API framework served up by the Apache Web Server on Linux. That sounded great; we have a lot of experience with the .NET Framework and a lot of experience with Linux but so far have not brought[...]

David Hannaford and Mark Stone attended Digital Health Oxford’s Hackday, held at the Oxford Launchpad in Said Business School, Oxford, over the weekend of 12th and 13th July. David’s team came 2nd for the data visualization tool they built to enable a doctor to show a patient their survival rate if they are at risk from cardiac issues. The app calculates the survival rate of an individual by looking at data on risk factors, such as age, weight, blood pressure,[...]

Reynold Greenlaw and Andy Muddiman attended the Oxford Startups demo night at Oxford Launchpad in the Said Business School, on 15th May where they demoed the GaitAssist smartphone app that has been developed for the Cupid project. They demoed it pretty much continuously at our very busy table to the many interested attendees and our communications manager Janine Smith joined in to lend a hand. The app continuously compares the gait of a user with Parkinson’s disease during walking with[...]

We recently started a new project – EmerGent, which is a 3 year European project researching the impact of social media by emergency services during a crisis. Whenever there’s a large fire, riot, earthquake or other crisis a lot of information immediately appears in social media – some valuable, some completely erroneous. With our partners we are developing tools and techniques for mining and validating that content. The EU-FP7 EmerGent project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework[...]

A personal blog post from our Director of Consultancy Projects As well as delivering products, OCC has a team that specialises in custom software development; they are behind the wide variety of case studies on our website. This combination of teams working on custom software and product development & support is, I think, unique. Once a year I take the custom development team out for a day to discuss how we might write even better software. This time we crossed[...]

For our 2013 Christmas do we decided we would visit our colleagues in Poland rather than go for the usual Christmas outing. As Poland tends to be rather chilly in December we opted to hold out until May and hope for some summery weather. So, over a long weekend, we (along with friends and partners) enjoyed the delights of a boat trip, a visit to underground cellars where vodka is made and aged, a walk round a picturesque lake, two[...]

We believe there are many organisations implementing systems that conform to the following pattern: A patient is being supported at home. They wear sensors and/or use a smartphone. Sometimes there is a home unit that wirelessly connects to the sensors/smartphone. The data is securely transferred to a server. There is a browser based application by which a clinician accesses the data. Sometimes the clinician can send data back to the patient via the home unit or smartphone. There may be[...]

Reynold Greenlaw, Director of Consultancy at OCC, recently presented at eHealth and the Brain – ICT for Neuropsychiatric Health held in Brussels on the 5th November 2013. His presentation on Telemedicine and eHealth for Neurology, focused on the OCC’s involvement in the CuPiD Project. CuPiD is a three year EU project powered by an eight member consortium led by the University of Bologna. The CuPiD project is developing and field-testing home rehabilitation services for the major motor disabilities caused by Parkinson’s[...]